Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday August 09, 2013 @12:43PM
from the easier-than-sending-people dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Time Magazine reports that in and effort to involve non-rocket scientists in the next mission to the Red Planet, NASA invited the public in May to submit haiku, three line poems where 'the first and last lines must have exactly five syllables each and the middle line must have exactly seven syllables.' NASA promised to select five winners that will be adhered to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) before it is launched towards Martian airspace. 'The Going to Mars campaign offers people worldwide a way to make a personal connection to space, space exploration, and science in general, and share in our excitement about the MAVEN mission,' said Stephanie Renfrow, lead for the MAVEN Education and Public Outreach program at CU/LASP. More than 15,000 entries were submitted by space geeks and poets the world over. A couple thousand were disqualified as too long, too short, or totally inappropriate, leaving about 12,500. The public voted online, and the five top vote-getters have been announced."
The winner:

[snark level=99]I think it's more like an interstellar dick-measuring contest. The United States, confident of it's military supremacy over Earth, now greedily eyes Mars. Who knows... while they were looking for water, maybe they discovered oil and just haven't said anything yet.[/snark]

"There is the moral of all human tales;Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,First Freedom, and then Glory â" when that fails,Wealth, vice, corruption, â" barbarism at last.And History, with all her volumes vast,Hath but one page".

Well, as humans we invade parts of our anything-infested cesspool on a regular basis. Even though we know what 'crap' we are getting. So why wouldn't an alien species?

Of course if there's any intelligent life on Mars, they will have known for a long time about us humans. Radio / TV transmissions, the odd nuclear explosion, a few space probes passing by & landing on Mars, etc. So for anyone who fears an alien invasion: I suggest to look outside our solar system.

The winning poem sucks but what do you expect. Instead of celebrating human achievement we are sending a poem bitching about how horrible Earth is and that at a time it is the most peaceful it has ever been (at least since human civilizations took off). Talk about a lack of imagination and perspective.

Is this supposed to be a trick question? Let's give an example of the peace, Europe. This is the most peaceful Europe has been since probably before man arrived in Europe. They haven't had any military conflicts on the entire continent since the end of the Yugoslavia wars in 1999. That's more than ten years of no military conflicts whatsoever.

Let's given some developing world examples, China and India. China has no border skirmishes with barbarians which differentiates this era from most of the past eras

You're just an anonymous idiot on the internet. You have even less credibility than wikipedia.

Sure most of the major conflicts are in the Middle East and Africa. But what about all the, guess you call it small crimes then, shootings, beatings, robing, homicide, all keeps going up.

And here's an example of your idiocy. Ever heard of the highly technical media phrase "If it bleeds, it leads"? News is about reporting bad things that happen. Those small crimes go up in some places and down in others. There's no trend toward greater levels of crime.

But even if there were such a trend, it's still peace. Military action is a whole different ballgame than small crime.

Just wait a little longer and the next conflict will start. The number of immigrants crossing the border to the "western" European countries is increasing on a daily basis.
Conflict should happen within the next few years.

Wherever you have large numbers of intelligent beings competing over scarce resources, you will have war.

Wars are seldom about "scarce resources". Historically, wars were more likely to occur after good harvests. Also, war does not require "large numbers". Small tribes go to war more frequently than large nations.

Where do you see the cost with this? If you notice, the contest website is hosted by the University of Colorado in Boulder, not NASA. The poems were created and submitted by the public, not NASA. The poems were judged by the public, not NASA. They could literally print the winners out on a piece of paper and tape it to the outside of the spacecraft. Instead though, they are burning the poems to a DVD and shipping that along with the spacecraft. I doubt that NASA is paying for the DVD, and I doubt that

DVD movie weighs 0.034 lbs, Average Cost-per-LB to GTO $11,243. Gives us a cost of $382.26. That's just to geosynchronous orbit. I will leave it to you to extrapolate the cost of that DVD going to Mars.

Well, zero, because of course you wouldn't send the DVD to Mars; you'd copy the poems onto memory. Five poems, at seventeen syllables per poem, what do you figure, a few hundred bytes? It's unlikely that the every byte of the computer's RAM is completely used, so just put the poems in the unused space. Weight: zero.

This reminds me of an old story. There was an aircraft in which the design was coming in overweight, so an accountant was assigned to be the "weight czar," to account for the mass of every subsystem and see how it could be made lighter. This weight czar was very annoyed when one subsystem, software, listed their weight contribution as "zero." He went over to the computer department, asked for the prototype software that went into the aircraft, and walked out with a huge stack of computer cards (this was some years back. Don't interrupt.) . He summoned the software team to a meeting, and shouted "You list zero for the weight of your software, but" (plunks down the stack of cards) "here is is, and this DOES NOT WEIGHT NOTHING! Don't try to fool me!" The lead software engineer went up to the stack of cards. He said "You don't understand. The software isn't the cards." He picked up one card and showed it to the accountant. "The software is the HOLES."

I don't think so, I don't think that when NASA fires off a rocket, that the rocket contains the exact minimum amount of fuel required for the trip, I'm sure there is a small degree of additional fuel added for anything unforseen. I'm sure they plan those missions so that they can add low-weight things, like a DVD, without increasing the fuel that the rocket otherwise would have launched with. If that is the case, then the launch cost would be the same with or without the DVD, it would just end up with sli

The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru).[1] This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji ("cutting word") between them,[2] a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.

Traditional haiku consist of 17 on (also known as morae), in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 on respectively.[3] Any one of the three phrases may end with the kireji.[4] Although haiku are often stated to have 17 syllables,[5] this is inaccurate as syllables and on are not the same.

A kigo (seasonal reference), usually drawn from a saijiki, an extensive but defined list of such words.

It's one thing to send crap to where something might be alive and capable of reading it, but a planet with no known intelligent life that we've scouted out pretty well (for what it is)? What a waste of time.

I would say a poem should be chosen by astrophysicists or poets, but the whole concept is just to interest the public in something ultimately non-scientific.

make your mars poem choice
using mob intelligence
silly message sent

It might be cheaper than printing a poem sticker, and more interesting also, to simply state that when you view the poem over your WiFi connection, you are sending electromagnetic signals out of the atmosphere, (past triads of listening satellites), and some photons of your WiFi ac

Just about anything that applies the special snowflake formula to the entire human species tends to win these things. We're total suckers for anything that affirms our special-snowflakeness, even if it's our epic fascination with beating the shit out of each other.

Vulcans? Too evolved. If doesn't count if you're good all the time. What matters is that once you were bad, but now you have risen. Otherwise you're just too smart for your own good and you don't really understand the shit that goes down.